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Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Singapore/Bali trip diary - day 11

We woke
up early, to the rain; at around 6 am I think I heard a ceremony of some kind in
the distance, although I couldn't tell for sure. We ordered our final
breakfast and ate it on our covered patio table (as opposed to our other table, the one under the big umbrella...what a place...); then we packed and left. When we'd
checked out, they gave us something from a local textile batik as a final gift.
By chance, we had the same driver again, Agusta, but today’s drive was much
more slow and functional (at least there were no shakedowns). I didn’t
mention before how much garbage we noticed in Bali (especially in comparison to
Singapore) – even on our emblematic walk through the ricefields. It’s a small
thing, but a further reminder that unspecific notions of an island paradise
(which I think is as much as most people have of it; it’s certainly as much
as we had) can’t come very close to
engaging with the reality of a place. In some ways, the West seems fairly
tightly at bay here – we didn’t for example see the images of Hollywood
celebrities that you see throughout Japan, and the usual brand names seemed
fairly scarce (the Starbucks in the middle of Ubud looked rather out of place);
I don’t think the locals brandish their cellphones as much as we’ve seen
elsewhere. But there’s also a lot of noise and rubble and tumbledown houses
and, from the looks of it, some very strained economic realities.

When we
got to the airport, he handed us off to another Four Seasons person who happily
steered us through the process. It’s not much of an airport for such a storied
location – actually it feels more like a bus terminal (a new airport is under
construction however). But I guess a steady stream of notable visitors pass
through it, currently including the participants in the Miss World contest
which is happening here shortly (we caught a glimpse of Miss Singapore, who I
guess from a local perspective would be one of the most exciting ones).

In
retrospect, it's possible I didn’t book this part of the trip very skillfully – I initially
booked the Toronto/Singapore return flight and then as a separate exercise booked the return flight
between Singapore and Bali, but I could have cut out the return to Singapore,
most obviously by having us fly directly from Bali to Hong Kong, where we make
our connection. But on examining the logistics, it probably wouldn’t have yielded
that much either in terms of additional quality time nor cost savings. Anyway,
it’s hardly necessary to stain this account by musing on such trivial
imperfections.

And
if we hadn’t done it this way, we wouldn’t have had our last night in
Singapore. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza at the airport – you glide right into
it from the terminal. It’s a very striking hotel, built around a large garden
and swimming pool; our room also has a glass-walled toilet, the rationale for
which is a bit difficult to grasp. At around 5 pm we took the subway system
downtown – we’d never used it during our earlier stay. It was of course very
smooth and handsome and stainless, even if we might have forgotten how long it inherently
takes to use the subway.

We
returned to the site of our first morning walk – Marina Bay and the Gardens by
the Bay. They were much busier this time, filled with joggers in particular – we walked
down to the bottom of the Gardens area, where the path elevates and gives you a
stunning view of the city skyline as it gets dark. There were people hanging
out, having picnics, taking formal and informal pictures, playing Frisbee.
There’s an area of fountains which recalls the recently-developed spot at
Sherbourne Common in Toronto where I walk Ozu most mornings – the difference is
that in Toronto it’s the whole destination, whereas here it’s just a throwaway
detail within a project of incomparably greater vastness. And it’s still being
enhanced – construction workers were working on what seemed to be some
high-tech (naturally) water and light show.

It’s
impossible to convey the glory of the sightlines, albeit an imperial,
potentially deranged kind of glory – for example, it feels like we’ve been able
to view the Marina Bay Sands hotel, the one with the ship-like platform on top,
from every conceivable angle; likewise the London Eye-type attraction. At
the foot of the hotel there’s a reportedly vast casino, and near there a retail
mall of what seems like just irrational grandeur, with a canal and boat rides
through the centre. It feels like a city that just throws out absurdly overreaching
ideas and then effortlessly does reach them, just to show it can. And while we’ve
seen more than a few impressive urban waterfronts around the world, this one might be the most
stunning, in its size and diversity and total command of its effects (equally
impressive, if you go to the end of the Gardens and look out in the other
direction, the waterscape is entirely different, crammed with industrial vessels,
because along with everything else this is one of the world’s busiest ports).

The inherently absurd and yet hypnotic “Super Trees” were cycling
through different light schemes and pulsing in tune to some suitably eerie but
pulsating music. A little later we encountered something similar by the bay,
with a crowd gathered to watch the water - as if without human intervention - generate flames and bubbles and colours and
effusions in tune to a blaring soundtrack. It’s crass and airheaded of course,
judged as a cultural performance, but certainly expresses a city possessed with easy confidence. We sat
at a restaurant there and shared a pizza and a salad (so the culinary
expeditions on this trip are over). And then we caught a cab back to the hotel.
The cab driver chattered happily about the country’s continuing growth, how
every citizen recently received some kind of $500 bonus, how the government
plans to grow the population by some 2 million people in coming years, mainly
by immigration, but of a kind veering toward the skilled and the committed. You
can’t help thinking this sounds like a bubble that can only at some point catastrophically
burst, but the way the city looked tonight, I think anyone would have mused
about signing up…